


Origin Story

by Port



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 08:03:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6110287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/pseuds/Port
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apparently, the safest place for a woman at risk of exploding--at any moment, actually exploding--was Stark Tower in New York City.</p><p>Post-Iron Man 3, Pepper has to deal with Extremis while Tony and Bruce try to invent a cure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origin Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mandergee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mandergee/gifts).



> Happy Leap Day to Mandergee! Thanks for the wonderful prompts and hope you enjoy the fic!

Apparently, the safest place for a woman at risk of exploding--at any moment, actually exploding--was Stark Tower in New York City.

“I know we renovated with Bruce in mind after the attack, but Tony, are you sure--”

“One hundred and ten percent.” Tony led her by the hand off the helicopter that had taken them from JFK as though escorting her to a fancy ball, as though she were a princess in a gown, rather than the bedraggled survivor of kidnapping and scientific experimentation. And a two-hundred-foot fall. And a terrible oil tanker fire. And actual combat with a super-powered man. As though she couldn’t, should she lose focus, burn his fingers off with the palm of her hand.

Gasping, Pepper snatched her hand away from Tony. “Sorry, sorry, just….”

He approached her with a knowing look in his eyes and slowly reached out for her. “You won’t hurt me,” he said. Given that it wasn’t unusual for him to say things that weren’t true, he did tell the truth an astonishing amount of the time. She was so inclined to believe him now, except….

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I know you.” He continued over her protest, “I know what you look like when you’ve got things under control. It’s what you always look like. You’ve got this.”

He waggled the hand held out to her. Pepper took a deep breath, checked herself, and then took hold of it. Together, as though coming home after a date, they walked across the roof to the entrance.

~~

Jarvis had been running calculations and setting up the lab while they were in the air from Miami, soTony went right down to begin working on an Extremis cure. Pepper could tell he was exhausted; she had learned what he had been up to since the destruction of their Malibu home, and she was pretty sure he hadn’t slept the entire time. She was also pretty sure he wouldn’t sleep until he had at least checked on Jarvis’s calculations, so she decided to draw a bath, clean up, and then go collect him to go to bed together. 

She’d changed clothes mid-flight, wishing it were possible to remove Extremis as easily as the black sports bra and yoga pants she’d had to wear since her kidnapping. Now, disrobing in the master bathroom, Pepper took stock of her body. She’d been strapped to a table, but her skin was free of bruises and cuts. She’d fallen two hundred feet--two hundred!--but not a bone was broken. She’d killed a man--a monster, in defense of Tony!--but even her nails were perfect. In fact…. She knelt down to inspect the pinky toe on her left foot that had always been a little crooked, the nail a little small.

“Well,” Pepper said, studying the unfamiliar but not unattractive shape of it. 

She stood up and lifted her foot onto the counter. It was like a new foot, free of calluses, the heel rounder, like it had not been stood and walked on for a lifetime. The toes were less inverted, and, incredibly, the arch didn’t threaten her with any customary traces of pain from the heels she was stuck with for work. Staring in wonder, she realized neither foot hurt at all. Pepper sat down on the side of the tub and looked at them both.

Killian had quipped, when she’d been so stunned by his improved appearance, that it was amazing what five years of intense physical therapy could do. He had been lying; Extremis was responsible for everything different about him. He had been like a new man, taller, broader at the shoulders, posture easy and open instead of hunched closed. Even his teeth had been straighter. 

Pepper lunged toward the mirror and opened her mouth, but there hadn’t been much wrong with her teeth to begin with and nothing seemed different. She stepped away and took a look at her entire naked body. Was she a fraction of an inch taller? Her musculature seemed to have more definition, as though she’d been working out harder than usual. The memory returned of flipping into the air and putting her molten arm through the Iron Man suit and then slamming it to the ground. Pilates sure wasn’t the culprit.

She turned around a few times. Most women would kill for changes like these. Pepper would have, at various times in her life. Probably the difference lay in having the changes forced on her by a psychopath who had injected her with an experimental formula in order to one-up her boyfriend.

No, that was definitely where the difference lay.

Pepper climbed into the bath. The water was steaming, but easy to adjust to. She lay back and closed her eyes and tried to imagine that the entire world had stopped what it was doing in order to let her think. That usually worked.

By the time Tony came in, Pepper had a holographic to-do list and her digital planner floating in front of her and was discussing with Jarvis where to put various items over the following week.

“Don’t you ever relax?” Tony asked, sitting by her on the edge of the tub. 

“This is me relaxing,” she said, swiping an item into the Tuesday column. “Besides, you’re one to talk.”

He reached for her shoulder and squeezed, set up a rhythm that made her close her eyes and sigh. “I’m always talking. To be honest, I’m relieved you’re bouncing back so quickly after, you know, your ordeal.”

“Is that what we’re calling it, my ordeal?”

“I asked Jarvis for a list of possible euphemisms and that was the best he could come up with. What do you think? I kind of liked ‘horribly traumatic nightmare,’ but he keeps telling me to exercise my tact.”

“There goes Jarvis again, tilting at windmills.”

“Yeah.” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, lips lingering against her hair. 

“Before I show you my new feet, how did it go in the lab?”

“New feet?” Tony did a doubletake toward the end of the tub, but her feet were buried under a tuft of white bubbles. “You have new feet?”

“You wouldn’t have come up here if you weren’t at a stopping point,” Pepper said. “So either you’re running more calculations, you ran into a roadblock, or….”

“I don’t have a cure yet,” Tony said quickly, apparently not wanting to get her hopes up. “Emphasis on ‘yet.’ I want to get Bruce in on this and make sure we do it right.”

Bruce was in Hong Kong for a symposium. She had called him as soon as she’d learned Tony had survived Malibu, persuaded him not to fly back early to help. He had been so relieved that Tony was okay. How had Tony, so late in life, come into the talent for making friends with genuinely good people?

“He’s on a plane right now,” Tony continued. “Between the two of us, we should have it wrapped up soon.”

‘Soon’ was very vague. “What if I lose control before you’re ready?”

“You haven’t so far. Though I have to ask, have you been using your newfound powers to keep the water warm? How long have you been in here?”

Pepper glanced at the readout on her holo. “An hour. Oh, my God, the water’s still steaming!”

“See, you’re a natural at subconscious control of Extremis. And I’ll add that you seem to have discovered the first practical use for it.”

“I could start a fire! Or explode! How can you--”

“Because it’s you. If you’ll remember, I once asked you to stick your hand in my chest. And just this evening you saved my life, took out a big bad, and powered down like a champ. I’m a scientist. I follow the data.”

Pepper sighed. “I’m still going to sleep in the Hulk-proof quarters until this is sorted out.”

“One condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You tell me what’s going on with your feet.”

~~

Bruce arrived the next afternoon with bags under his eyes and a mournful air about him as he greeted Pepper. 

“I can imagine what you’re going through. How are you holding up?”

“Well, Tony’s here, so….”

“Ah, the hits keep coming,” Bruce quipped, startling a laugh out of Pepper. He looked pleased to have made her smile, and just like that things were normal between them again, no longer awkward with improvised etiquette surrounding faked death and real kidnappings.

As she accompanied him to the lab where Tony waited, Bruce said, “This is probably the last thing you want to hear, but I’m going to have to give you a physical and run some tests.”

“I was expecting that at some point. When do you want to begin?”

“Well, right now would be best. Tony said he has a treatment synthesized already. We need to decide what effect it will have on your body, whether it’s safe to use or if there might be… side effects. A series of experimental trials should help us figure that out.”

Two things struck Pepper at once. First, that Tony was further along with reversing Extremis than he had led her to believe, and second, that Bruce would never allow either of them to give in to the temptation of a quick fix. Ordinarily, Pepper preferred not to jump before looking too, but she had to admit that a part of her would drink any weird, untested concoction that stood half a chance of getting Extremis out of her system forever. 

Sometimes, Tony did the absolute right thing.

~~

The physical took place in a little medic bay adjacent to Tony’s lab that had only really been used at this point to treat the minor cuts and burns Tony accumulated while tinkering. She sat on a cot and cooperated as though this was any old doctor’s appointment. Bruce had a mellow bedside manner and a gentle, clinical touch that put Pepper at ease throughout the examination. When she told him about her feet, he looked them over seriously and then asked whether she had pre-Extremis pictures or x-rays of them, for comparison.

“Jarvis has some bodyscans taken for security. Jarvis, you can give Dr. Banner access to those and anything else he needs.”

“Yes, Ms. Potts,” Jarvis replied. A low _ding_ sounded from Bruce’s Starkpad, indicating receipt of a link to the data.

“Thanks, Pepper. And, er, Jarvis.” Bruce looked up from Pepper’s toes to make eye contact. “The physical exam is almost over. Next we’ll see if you can access your powers again, but first I want to ask how you feel.”

The prospect of burning Bruce or exploding made her say, “Apprehensive.”

“Understood,” he said, and she believed him. “What other adjectives describe your feelings today?” From most, the question might have been condescending, but he sounded like he sincerely wanted to know.

“Impatient. I want to feel safe again. Anxious. I’m afraid of hurting somebody.” She searched for what lay beneath those surface emotions, frowning down at the floor. “Afraid. Yesterday on the oil tanker, I… I never felt so alive. I walked out of a fire and took down one of Tony’s suits by flipping into the air and melting my arm through its chest, and then I killed a man like it was nothing.” She lifted her eyes to see what kind of judgment Bruce wore, but saw only compassion. “I didn’t like killing him; he just kept coming at us and it seemed like the only thing to do. But from the moment I walked out of the fire, there was something in me that felt… thrilled with all that power. And that makes me feel very afraid of myself.”

Bruce’s face had lost its clinical mask. In the short time she’d known him, he’d never looked so open, or so wrecked.

“Oh, God. Bruce, I didn’t mean to--”

“No, no,” he hurried to say, “You did good. I just wasn’t expecting to relate so much is all.”

They laughed half-heartedly. 

“Has Extremis manifested at all since the tanker?”

“Once, yes.”

Bruce’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

“I reheated my bath to keep it from getting cold.” 

This time there was nothing half-hearted about their laughter.

Pepper squeezed Bruce’s shoulder and stood up from the cot. “Before we start testing my super-powers I think I’ll order us all an early dinner for afterward. Be right back.”

“I’ll get Tony. He probably wants to be here for the tests.”

~~

Bruce was correct in apparently assuming that Pepper could use Tony’s moral support as they tested her new abilities. In a heat-shielded room, Pepper reached deep into herself and made her arms burn molten orange-red. She melted a block of steel like it was butter using only her finger. She generated fire with her hands and sprayed it across the room, where it caught on a table. From the viewing room, Tony mentioned that one of Killian’s men had been able to blow fire from his mouth, but that was nothing Pepper wanted to try. 

“That does sound unpleasant,” came Bruce’s voice through the intercom. “You’re doing great, by the way. Are you able to power down again?”

“I sure hope so,” Pepper muttered, closing her eyes. After a moment, the exhilaration that had sputtered to life alongside her powers dampened and then blew away, leaving her abruptly disoriented. She heard the door open, and then Tony was inside the still very hot room and standing by her side. Instinctively, Pepper reached her hands out to the far wall, and the little flames still lapping at the table vanished.

“So, the temperature of the room just dropped down to seventy-three degrees,” Bruce informed them over the intercom.

Tony whistled as he draped one arm over her shoulder, unheeding of the fact that her skin had until moments ago been red hot. “I never saw one of Aldrich’s crew do that,” he said, pulling her toward him.

“To be fair, they were trying to kill you, not put you out,” Pepper said. She looked around at the room. It smelled of woodsmoke and seared metal, but as Bruce had announced, the temperature was… comfortable. Exactly the temperature she liked, actually. “Tony, I might actually have some control over this,” she said, hearing the wonder in her voice.

“I’ve been saying so, haven’t I?”

“We’ll need to do more tests before we can be sure, Pepper,” Bruce said. “But so far, so good. You might not need the stabilizing compound Tony synthesized.”

Pepper turned to Tony. “You haven’t told me about that. Is it a cure?”

Tony threw an annoyed glance at the camera that fed back into the observation room before addressing her. “I haven’t told you about it because it’s not ready yet. You know how I like to wait until things are all done before I show them off, right?”

Pepper slipped out from under his arm. “And you know how I like to be in the loop on everything all the time, right?”

“Fair point.” They regarded each other for a few moments. Pepper felt a faint stirring of arousal; their arguments so often ended in sex that even minor disagreements had that effect on her these days. Tony had admitted the same, once, and she could see that certain sparkle in his eye now. He cleared his throat. “It’s not a cure. Like Bruce said, it’s meant to stabilize Extremis in your system, keep it under your control. What the compound doesn’t do is remove Extremis.”

“So I couldn’t explode--”

“But you could still heat a pizza without an oven if you chose to, yes.”

“Bruce just suggested I might not need it, though. Why wouldn’t I want to take it?”

Bruce’s voice cut in: “Because it needs testing!”

“Would you come over here already? There’s only room for one disembodied voice in this tower, pal,” Tony said. He turned to Pepper again. “Testing, yes. Especially because there seems to be a 53 percent chance the compound would keep us from reversing things later.”

“I’d have Extremis forever? What about a cure?”

Bruce appeared at the door, frowning at his Starkpad. “We may want to move away from thinking about this in terms of a cure,” he said grimly.

Pepper opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but no words came out. Tony scowled, but to Pepper’s surprise, he didn’t contradict Bruce. “So it’s true?” Tony asked instead.

“I just had a chance to look at the analyses of the samples we took today, and they confirm it. Pepper, let’s sit down somewhere and I’ll explain.”

Pepper nodded tightly and led them out of the room, down the hall. “Here’s a conference room,” she said, unnecessarily, and seated herself at the board table within. Tony sat at her side, Bruce across from her. He folded his hands and began to explain.

It turned out that Extremis did not add new abilities to a subject’s body. Rather, it rebuilt the body from the molecular level, rewriting the genetic blueprint to override physical defects both congenital and sustained while adding heat-based powers. It hadn’t fixed Killian’s spine; it had replaced it with a straighter new one that could burn red hot.

“So my feet….”

“Are actually brand new,” Bruce confirmed. “But so is the rest of you.”

Pepper stared at her hands, which she had noticed earlier were free of writing callouses and the little scars one picked up over a lifetime of cooking over a stove and petting cats. If pressed to identify her feelings, she would have to say she felt a mix of violation and wonder.

“That is why I would discourage us from thinking in terms of a cure,” Bruce said, gently. “Extremis has been coded into your revised DNA. Removing it is not possible.”

Tony took tight hold of her hands. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t more options.”

“The, what did you call it? The stabilizing compound.” Pepper felt numb. “I don’t understand. If this is permanent already, how can the stabilizer make anything worse?”

“That’s a good question,” Bruce said. “The stabilizer, we’re pretty sure, would make Extremis resistant to the instabilities that caused it to explode in the earlier test subjects, but there are signs that you would retain your new abilities. At this point, we have calculated a 53 percent chance that the stabilizer would also render any further therapies ineffective.”

“Are there other therapies?”

Bruce looked to Tony, who frowned and squeezed her hands tighter. “Not yet, but it’s early days.”

They gave her some time to process, which Pepper truly appreciated. She imagined the whole world stopping for her again.

“So I could take the stabilizing compound--when you declare it safe,” she added when Bruce opened his mouth to interrupt, “--and ensure that no one around me gets hurt in an explosion like Happy got caught in, but give up any chance of being normal--that is, non-powered.”

Bruce nodded, looking pained. Tony sighed.

“But I could still function as usual, live my normal life, only with the ability to heal from almost anything and defend myself.”

They both stared at her. 

“Well, when you put it that way,” Bruce said.

Tony grinned. “My God, Potts, I love the way you think.”

Pepper smiled warmly at him. Some dinner, some rest, and eventually some weird concoction that had been tested to within an inch of its half-life, and maybe the safest place for anyone she loved would be wherever she went. That was the most important thing, right? She wiggled her new toes, licked her new lips, and supposed that was all she could ask for now.


End file.
